“Your father needs taking care of himself, Sheila. We must plan ways of trying to make him more comfortable. Don’t you think of something that he needs that we could get for him?”
“More socks—he would like,” Sheila said unexpectedly. “When his socks get holes in them he will not wear them. He stops whatever he is doing to mend them, and the mends hurt him. He mends my stockings, too, sometimes, but I like better the holes especially when he mends them on my feet.”
Sheila could have presented no more appealing picture of her father to Nancy’s vivid imagination. Collier Pratt with the incongruous sewing equipment of the unaccustomed male, using, more than likely, black darning cotton on a white sock—Nancy’s mental pictures were always full of the most realistic detail—bent tediously over a child’s stocking, while the precious sunlight was streaming unheeded upon the waiting canvas. She darned very badly herself, but the desire was not less strong in her to take from him all these preposterous and unbefitting tasks, and execute them with her own hands. She stared at the child fixedly.
“You buy him some socks out of your allowance,” she said at last. Then she added an anxious and inadequate “Oh, dear!”
“Aren’t you happy?” Sheila asked in unconscious imitation of Dick, with whom she had been spending most of her time for days, while Nancy superintended the additions and improvements she was making in the up-stairs quarters of her Inn, preparatory to moving in for the winter.
“Yes, I’m happy,” Nancy said, “but I’m sort 160 of—stirred, too. I wish you were my own little girl, Sheila. I think I’ll take you with me to the Inn to-day. You might melt and trickle away if I left you alone here with Hitty.”
“Quelle joie! I mean, how nice that will be! Then I can talk about Paris to Gaspard, and he will give me some baba, with a soupçon of maraschine in the sauce, if you will tell him that I may, Miss Dear.”
“I’ll think about it.” It was Nancy’s dearest privilege to be asked and grant permission for such indulgences. “Put on that floppy white hat with the yellow ribbon, and take your white coat.”
“When I had only one dress to wear I suppose I got just as dirty,” Sheila reflected, “only it didn’t show on black satin. Now I can tell just how dirty I am by looking. I make lots of washing, Miss Dear.”